Feast day: March 26

St. Margaret Clitherow

Martyr · 1556–1586

Patron of Businesswomen

A York butcher's wife and convert who hid priests in her home during the persecution; refusing to plead so as to spare her children a trial, she was crushed to death.

Margaret Clitherow, remembered as 'the Pearl of York,' was born about 1556, the daughter of a city official, and married John Clitherow, a prosperous York butcher. Some three years into her marriage she converted to the Catholic faith, then fiercely outlawed in Elizabethan England.

She became one of the boldest of recusants. Behind her husband's shop she sheltered hunted priests and arranged for the secret celebration of Mass, kept a hidden room and a network of safe houses, and saw to the Catholic education of children — all capital offences. She was imprisoned several times, on one occasion bearing a child in prison.

Arrested in 1586 after a search uncovered her priest's hiding place, she refused to enter a plea, so that no trial might force her own children and servants to testify and so share her guilt. The law's answer to a refusal to plead was the peine forte et dure — to be crushed to death under weights.

She was executed on Good Friday of 1586, pressed to death in about fifteen minutes, reportedly while pregnant. She was canonized in 1970 among the Forty Martyrs of England and Wales.

Called 'the Pearl of York,' she was pressed to death under a door piled with weights — refusing to plead guilty or not guilty to protect her family and friends.

“God be thanked, I am not worthy of so good a death as this.”
— St. Margaret Clitherow

Image: zeitgenössischer Stecher, um 1750, nach älterer Darstellung (Public domain), via Wikimedia Commons.

Source: newadvent.org/cathen/04059b.htm